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Trade Routes
Trade routes and urban supply routes are the sequences of pathways and stopping places used for the commercial transport of cargo. Trade routes connect public markets. They also link producers with such markets. Supply routes, by contrast, take products directly to individual consumers. Both categories of routes are best conceptualized as long-distance arteries, spanning tens or hundreds of miles, which are connected to countless smaller capillaries of both commercial and non-commercial transport.

Historically, most trade and supply routes have operated without specific names. This is the case, for instance, with 15th century transports of grain from south to north China, 16th century shipments of sugar from the Canary Islands to Spain, 17th century shipments of silver from Mexico to the Philippines, 19th century exports of tobacco and cotton from the United States to England, and with 21st century shipments of crude oil from the Middle East to Japan. Sometimes, however, the major cargo has lent its name to the entire network, for example: amber routes (across Europe), silk roads (across Central Asia, northern India and the Middle East), salt routes (in India, Tibet, the Sahara, the Middle East, Europe), horse and tea routes (across East Asia and the Tibetan Plateau), or ivory routes (in the Sahara, West Africa and East Africa).

The emergence and growth of trade and supply routes, as well as postal routes (operated by runners, riders, and couriers traveling by carts and ships) and signals routes (maintained by means of homing pigeons, beacons, watch-towers, and semaphore stations), strongly parallels the emergence and growth of urban civilizations. These four transportation / communication networks are considered to be essential to the emergence of today's world, in which spatially separate places are strongly dependent on each other's daily activities.

Routes and their functions
Trade routes, supply routes, and passenger routes (established by movement of fare-paying travelers) represent commercially motivated transport operations. When such activities are secret, so as to avoid paying custom duties, a smuggling route is created.

Non-commercial transport networks also exist and flourish. For example, state administration creates regular routes and circuits for inspections, administration of justice, and revenue collection. Likewise, extensive transport routes are created for the purposes of warfare (routes which supply fortresses and garrisons, routes of advance and 'communication lines' established during military campaigns); international politics (tribute routes); religion (pilgrimage routes); social relationships (exchange routes); socio-economic circumstances (nomadic transhumance routes, settlers' migration routes, pillagers' raiding routes).

Naturally, in most cases the above distinctions are conceptual ones. In practice, the same sequence of pathways would serve many purposes. Thus, desert caravans would transport merchandise, but also travelers, pilgrims, spies, missionaries and diplomats, as well as gossip, news, messages and mail. Similarly, the routes created by 10th century Vikings from Scandinavia and 16th century Bugis from the Indonesian archipelago were used for trade and piracy, for settling new lands, as well as for military conquests and state-building.

The origin of trade routes
Long-distance commercial transport of cargo is a comparatively late development in 200,000 years of human history. Archaeological research dates the earliest confirmed instances of long-range relays of cargo of gifts to establish or improve inter-group relationships to around 9000 BCE. Trans-regional contacts motivated chiefly by profit, as opposed to social, political or religious considerations, took another 5,000 years to emerge.

The earliest evidence for the existence of long-distance commercial transportation paths comes from approximately 4000 BCE. This incipient network of merchant contacts was used for bringing lapis lazuli (lazurite, a semi-precious stone) from the Chagai mountains in western Pakistan to early urban settlements situated some 1,250 miles (2,000 km) away in lowland Mesopotamia (southern Iraq). Half a millennium later, around 3500 BCE, small quantities of lazurite were then shipped to cities in central Egypt, that is across an additional 1,250 miles.

Eleven maps of world-wide trade routes compiled in 2003 by archaeologist Andrew Sherratt show that over the past 50 centuries this commercial network of trails and roads, rivers and sea routes, grew larger and increasingly more intricate.

Technology and the evolution of trade routes
Land transport of heavy loads became possible with the domestication of donkeys and horses (about 5000 and 4000 BCE respectively), and the invention of the wheel (about 3000 BCE). Also, around 3000 BCE the domestication of camels opened up long-range trails through waterless lands.

Water transport formed another frontier to be diligently explored. Coracles and dugouts were used in Northern Europe from at least 9000 BCE. Around 3000 BCE the first boats of lashed-together wooden planks were built in Egypt. They would be propelled by up to 30 oarsmen, and could carry about four metric tons (8,900 lb.) of cargo. Equally important to the gradual conquest of the seas were advances in construction of robust yet smooth hulls, steering, rigging, sails (especially triangular sails which enabled ships to move against the wind), in the storage of potable water, and in the tools and theory of navigation. Successes in these areas enabled voyagers to replace coast-hugging journeys with open-sea routes.

By 2500 BCE a web of permanent trade routes connected the cities of the Mediterranean with those in western India. Around 1500 BCE a second network, centered on north-eastern China, was established. Around 1 CE, the two webs were bridged for the first time by commercial pathways formed across Central Asia, and across South East Asia. Finally, by about 1500 CE an almost-global system of sea and land trade routes linked economies from the Atlantic coast of the Americas, through Africa and Europe right to the Pacific coasts of Asia.

All these spatial transformations are quantifiable. The length of global routes from 3500 BCE till 1500 CE recorded in Sherratt's maps can be measured and combined with available statistics on the length of sea-lanes and railway-lines world-wide around 2000 CE.

This table shows that the total length of global trade routes varied, as did the relative spans of sea and land routes. While new pathways were being established, the old pathways always kept changing - they were shortened, extended, re-routed or abandoned in response to shifts in commercial opportunities, patterns of settlement, political upheavals, climatic changes, and leaps in transportation technology.

Logistical limitations
For most of the human history transport and communication revolved around two types of propulsion - human and animal muscles, and wind caught by a sail. Water transport was the more efficient and cheaper of the two. About 500 BCE Mediterranean ships could carry loads of 90 to 360 metric tons (200,000 to 800,000 lb.) for up to 60 miles (100 km) a day. Their crews were cost effective, because they were small: a total of 15 to 60 sailors and armed escorts, depending on the size of the ship. However, use of maritime routes was always strongly limited by seasonal and random weather patterns. Moreover, not all destinations were linked by seas, rivers and canals. Thus the slower, but more predictable overland routes were also heavily used.

Numbers of merchants traveling along a land route would vary. In some of the Tibetan caravans of the 20th century eight to nine people would lead a train of 30-40 ponies. On the other hand, the 13th century Turkish and Persian caravanserais were built to accommodate teams of no less than 300-400 mules and camels, with 50-70 drivers and a handful of traders. Finally, caravans of 5-20 thousands of pack animals were also known to be used for long-distance journeys.

Movement across land was limited chiefly by travelers' stamina and the reliability of access to food, fodder and drinking water. Land trade routes always lead from one re-victualling place to another. Where both fodder and water were plentiful so that only food needed to be carried, and where the provisions represented no more than 70% of the total load, exactly one metric ton (2,200 lb.) of merchandise could be transported by 133 porters walking some 168 miles (270 km) in nine days. Under the same conditions, a team of four drivers and 23 pack camels could move the same cargo across some 660 miles (1060 km) and do so in 38 days. However, where neither fodder nor water were available en route, and the weather was hot, the maximum operating ranges would shrink dramatically. Porters would walk only one day and cover a mere 14 miles (23 km), while the camels and their handlers would walk only for five days and cover no more than 90 miles (150 km). In short, sea routes were governed by capricious winds and the visibility of stars, while land routes were governed ruthlessly by the spacing of dependable sources of drinking water and the prevailing temperatures.

Despite such handicaps, global flows of products, skills, money, information, and ideas became, eventually, a practical reality. From 1500 CE onwards, for the first time in human history, multiple maritime and land routes connected reasonably efficiently and reliably most of the inhabited parts of the world. Finally, since late 18th century, multiple advances in mechanized transport (unlocked and fuelled by the industrial revolution) - starting with paddle steamboats (1783), and steam trains (1825), and continuing with motorcars (1885), and airplanes (1903) - have monopolised almost all commercial transportation arteries. Consequently, beasts of burden, as well as boats and sailships were put to work predominantly along the vast network of smaller-scale pathways and waterways, i.e. along the feeder routes. There, in early 21st century, they continue to supply and link human settlements in geographical environments which the contemporary mechanized transport systems find either impassable, or logistically impossible; or in comparison with other trade routes, unprofitable. In other words, both the old and new transportation technologies complement each other while making the everyday commercial movement of people, goods and information increasingly regular and frequent, and ever wider, larger and faster.

See also
Empires; Global History; Industrial Revolution; Networks; Pilgrimage; Postal Services; Railroads; Shipping; Slave Trade; Transportation; Trading Companies; Voyages of Discovery; World-System Theory

Bibliography

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Copyright (c) 2005 by Encyclopedia of Globalization. Grolier Academic. All rights reserved. This page may not be linked from other online pages.

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